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POLITICO to expand POLITICO Pro

By Dylan Byers

06/10/12 10:33 PM EDT

POLITICO Pro, the news subscription service launched in February 2011, is expanding its coverage to the military and the financial sector.

"Tomorrow morning, we'll announce plans to launch POLITICO Pro Defense and POLITICO Pro Finance — a package of coverage that will include financial services and tax policy," Editor in Chief John Harris, Executive Editor Jim VandeHei, and COO Kim Kingsley wrote in an email to the staff Sunday night.

The two new verticals — which join Energy, Health Care, Technology, and Transportation — will bring new talent to POLITICO, including at least 20 new reporters and editors and 20 new hires on the business side. Some current POLITICO journalists will also move into new roles on the military and financial beats.

The New York Times, which broke the news, notes that POLITICO's growth is rare for the national news industry, if not for Washington.

"The thing about the Washington journalism market that’s different from the rest of the country is that it’s a pretty robust market,” VandeHei told the Times. “We’ve been hiring in the last three or four years. It’s not like tons of people are running around Washington looking for work.”

The full email from KingsVandeHarris:

Two years ago this month, we started work on what would become POLITICO Pro. This move was a bet that our core readers would pay for access to intense, POLITICO-style coverage of Washington's most important policy issues.

We now have enough evidence--from impressive renewal rates on the three original policy verticals, rapidly growing revenue, and, above all, the first-rate journalism produced by Pro reporters on both the free and paid sides of the site--to declare this bet a winner. POLITICO publisher Robert Allbritton and CEO Fred Ryan have given us direction to move swiftly ahead with the next, very ambitious phase of Pro's growth.

Tomorrow morning, we'll announce plans to launch POLITICO Pro Defense and POLITICO Pro Finance - a package of coverage that will include financial services and tax policy. To produce that coverage, we'll be growing our newsroom dramatically - with more than two dozen new editorial positions and a similar number on the sales side.

This growth is in service of our larger ambition: to be Washington's dominant news organization on politics and policy.

We are confident we have built a business model that can sustain aggressive, smart and indispensable journalism. Much of the new coverage will be available to subscribers only. But any story that rises to broad or national import will be made available to our entire audience.

We have seen this model at work with the first four verticals - energy, health care, technology, and, most recently, transportation. Laura McGann in her new role has already had success, working with other Pro editors, in getting more policy stories into the lead of the main site.

We are proud of what all of you are accomplishing - and feel intense pride and optimism as we look ahead to what's next for POLITICO. We'll have more details in the coming weeks. And in the meantime, please let us know if you're interested in exploring roles on Pro Defense or Pro Finance.

John, Jim, Kim

NOTE: The POLITICO Pro project began two years ago, it launched in February 2011. The post has been updated to reflect that fact.